Helen J Shen’s Broadway career found a very happy beginning in Maybe Happy Ending. The 25-year-old actor stars as Claire, an obsolete robot that’s been abandoned by her owners and is facing her own mortality. The musical may be Shen’s Broadway debut, but her commanding performance proves it will be far from her last time gracing a Broadway stage.
Theater has always been a force in Shen’s life, from listening to cast recordings and watching musicals on PBS as a child (she was “obsessed with the Les Mis 10th anniversary concert,” she says), to getting involved with community and educational theater. But it wasn’t until high school that she opted to switch gears from classical piano, which she’s played all her life, to pursuing theater as a career. “I was like, ‘You know what? If I’m thinking about my life, I’m an only child, and I’ve spent a lot of my time doing things on my own,’” Shen recalls. “And I love doing that, but that’s why I think I gravitated towards theater, was because it was such a communal sport and such a team sport, and I fell in love with that.”
Piano is still a big part of Shen’s life. On the day-to-day, she’ll accompany herself to learn new songs or even write original music. “It’s definitely less disciplined than how I was playing when I was practicing for like four hours a day for competitions and stuff,” she says. “I think the fact that I had that discipline growing up, it’s still ingrained in me that that’s how my work ethic will manifest.”
“The fact that I am playing Claire, there’s an element of nonconforming to binaries.”
– Helen J Shen
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That fierce work ethic is both a blessing and a curse, Shen adds. “I have actually in my adulthood had to maybe unlearn some things, or just let go of some of those things, to give grace to myself and to be like, ‘Actually, there’s no hard deadline at the end of this. There’s no competition at the end of this. It’s just doing it to do it, and doing it for the joy and love of doing it.’ But I feel like I’m very grateful for that upbringing,” she says.
Shen got the chance to meld her passions for piano and acting off-Broadway last summer in a new rock musical called The Lonely Few, which earned her a Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding Featured Performer in a Musical. Shen played a pianist named JJ, a character she says felt very close to herself. “With the piano and the way that JJ was dressed — her vibe was very, like, Billie Eilish, big T-shirt, big pants, and that’s how I live my life,” she reflects.
That’s a far cry from her current character’s costume: a pleated skirt, cropped button-up, and hot pink jacket. Per Maybe Happy Ending’s casting call from last summer, Claire’s primary trait — beyond, of course, being an ultra-advanced robot called a Helperbot — is a “girlish and innocent appearance.”
“Claire is very femme-presenting,” Shen says. “If we’re thinking in binary senses, she is very on the femme side, but which is why I think playing Claire, I’ve enjoyed bringing my different sides to it.”
In Maybe Happy Ending, Claire eventually falls for a fellow Helperbot named Oliver, played by Darren Criss. His style, Shen notes, is just as traditionally masculine as Claire’s is feminine: a crisp white shirt, a red tie, and bright blue dress pants. Even their neighboring apartments reflect that dichotomy, with Claire’s often lit in pink light and Oliver’s in blue. But when it comes to robots, were these aesthetics their own decisions? Or were they chosen by some higher power: a previous owner, a manufacturer, or society in a broader sense?
“Presenting-wise, it looks very heteronormative,” Shen reasons. “It looks very blue/pink. There’s these stark differences. But I think both Darren and I enjoy meeting in the middle and exploring a little bit of like, if these are beings that you’ve just selected certain set things and they’re a reflection of the owner, how does gender or how does expression come from within? And is there stuff that is maybe programmed or unprogrammed, or things that are learned?”
“As a queer person playing this robot, I feel like it just brings some different context to it,” she adds. “The fact that I am playing Claire, there’s an element of nonconforming to binaries.”
Shen uses she/they pronouns, and a big part of her own journey with gender and self-discovery is embracing what she calls her “gremlin-y side.”
“It’s not girl/boy. It’s not woman/man. It’s just person,” she says. “I think in playing Claire, because she is so femme-presenting and those are the factory settings, if you will, I feel like the parts that […] stray from that societally accepted standard are the parts, actually, that I feel like Helen is the most reflected in Claire.”
But as Shen points out, it’s not as though she’s injecting queerness into an otherwise straight story. Maybe Happy Ending may technically portray a girl-meets-boy romance, but the characters of Claire and Oliver aren’t really a girl and boy at all. They’re machines, assigned genders by their creators, and their discovery of love doesn’t hinge on heterosexuality.
“For me, I think Claire just enjoys Oliver as a being and enjoys the company of Oliver, and Oliver could be in whatever body,” Shen explains. “I think that the way that their dynamics and their personalities mesh is the point, as opposed to being like, ‘Oh, this is a boy robot.’”
Indeed, part of the genius of Maybe Happy Ending — which features a book and score by Will Aronson and Hue Park — is that it turns classic tropes on its head. That’s reflected in its score, which takes inspiration from classic jazz standards. Maybe Happy Ending’s nostalgic sound and references to greats of the genre lull the audience into thinking they know where the story is headed, or that it’s like shows they’ve seen before. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.
“I actually think that the ways that our show takes left turns from those standard narratives are what keeps it feeling so fresh and new, and makes it feel like it’s a story that maybe we think we’ve heard before, but there’s still room to be surprised and be challenged in those ways,” Shen says. “It’s a fascinating piece that I actually don’t feel constricted by. I don’t feel constricted by the character description of this girl robot that lives in a pink room.”
Playing Claire has helped Shen find hope in the face of 2025’s seemingly constant wave of terrible news — and she hopes that audiences can learn from Maybe Happy Ending, too.
“Claire sees that, yes, the world is sometimes f*cked up and sometimes really desolate and there is an end date, and there’s an expiration date to her own life and to everyone else’s life,” Shen says. “But that can kind of set you free and make you wonder about what I should do with my time now, and how I can bring kindness and hope and light, even when it feels the most dark and like there’s really no reason to keep going. There always is, I guess, is what I want to say. As long as we continue to have the fire under our bellies, there is still hope.”
“I don’t feel constricted by the character description of this girl robot that lives in a pink room.”
– Helen J Shen
Shen has just as big of dreams for the future of Broadway, particularly as a new generation of theatermakers is finally making its way on stage, from Shen’s own performance in Maybe Happy Ending to the ensemble casts of shows like the currently running John Proctor is the Villain and the recent revival of Romeo + Juliet.
“I’m so excited to have more and more younger folk. There’s an anarchist spirit that I think I’m really excited about,” Shen says. “Especially going to school for musical theater when I did, which — my sophomore year was cut off by COVID, junior year was all remote — I think it put a lot of things into perspective. There are ways that we can do this industry differently to make it better for more people, and not just have the same people reflected on stage or behind the scenes and in these spaces.”
“There are still, like anything else, power dynamics that feel strange to me sometimes, and accessibility issues that I still feel like could always be better in terms of making sure that it’s not just the same kinds of people who are going to the theater,” she continues. “Specifically Broadway and the musical theater industry, it’s something that I love so deeply, and there’s often been times where I feel like it hasn’t loved me back in the same way that I love it, which is a systemic thing. That’s also just living life and being in the body that I am in. And there was a lot of moments of revelation at school that I was like, ‘Oh, I think when I get to a certain threshold, I want to do things differently than what I’ve been seeing,’
Her ultimate hope, Shen says, is to leave the theater industry a better place than she found it. “It doesn’t have to be so hard,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be like, ‘Oh, I struggled, and so everybody else has to struggle the same way.’” ♦
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